Emergence of Smart Asset Management

Overview

These are pivotal times for asset-intensive organizations. Many are experiencing unprecedented business challenges. In addition to a wide variety of economic and competitive headwinds confronting them, managing through the COVID-19 scenario presents an additional layer of challenges for maintenance and operations teams.

To better navigate through these challenges and opportunities, savvy industrial organizations are assessing new and novel ways to improve their operations. This not only means improving asset reliability and uptime, but also helping to boost operations performance. This requires a strategy that goes beyond mere cost savings and places increased emphasis on efficiency and productivity in both maintenance and operations.

At the same time, they are at an inflection point in the ramping-up of their digital transformation journeys, so many may have transitioned – or are in the process of transitioning – beyond traditional ERP, smart manufacturing, and now smart asset management.

Asset Management in Transition

The core mission of early asset management systems has traditionally been focused on the creation of work orders, scheduling, and completion. Much of these efforts were centered around reactive corrective maintenance activities.

When critical assets fail, the production or assembly process often stops, and corrective action is taken as soon as possible. Traditionally, time-and-usage metrics were used to plan and schedule preventive maintenance activities, and in some systems, parts information was included in high-value and high-criticality assets. The underlying solutions were typically maintenance management or CMMS programs, with EAM systems becoming available as the list of available capabilities and ability to scale grew.

Heightened Expectations for Industrial Maintenance Solutions

Today’s maintenance and operations leaders must contend with an ever-increasing, hypercompetitive global economic climate. Many realize that a convergence of IT and OT expertise and mindshare is needed to optimize operations. Efforts are well underway in many organizations to take four of the primary goals of asset management: equipment uptime, cost control, safety, and asset longevity, to the next level.

These areas are key reasons industrial organizations have chosen to adopt traditional asset management systems and are prompting strong interest in expanded IT and OT convergence available with smart asset management. The genesis of such ideas are the opportunities made possible with digital transformation, particularly in such areas as smart sensors, Industrial IoT, interoperability, analytics, AI, and ML.

Emphasis Shifting from Siloed to Aligned Maintenance and Operations Teams

The increasing adoption of digital transformation in asset-intensive industries, particularly in such areas as Industry 4.0, smart factories, and smart manufacturing are creating new opportunities and challenges for organizations. It’s becoming critically important to share visibility beyond equipment availability and downtime during production planning and assessing execution metrics.

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Keywords: Enterprise Asset Management, EAM, Digital Transformation, Smart Asset Management, SAM, Smart Manufacturing, IoT, Industrial IoT, Edge Computing, Asset Performance Management, APM, Maintenance, CMMS, ERP, COVID-19, ARC Advisory Group.